Tehran’s puppet brigades

As Israeli airstrikes intensified over towns as far north as the Beirut suburbs, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the people of Lebanon to stand up and free their country from terrorists: “You are suffering because of Hezbollah’s futile war against Israel. Today I ask every mother and every father in Lebanon, ‘Is it worth it?’”

Israel created a window of opportunity by killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several possible successors, Netanyahu added.

Days earlier, he made a similar appeal to Iranians on social media. “Our war is not against you,” he said in a video message recorded in English with Persian subtitles that went viral on Iran’s social media platforms.

“Every day, you see a regime that subjugates you, makes fiery speeches about defending Lebanon, defending Gaza,” Netanyahu said. “Yet every day, that regime plunges our region deeper into darkness and deeper into war.”

Both messages underscore Israel’s central claim since the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that ignited wars on multiple fronts and turned much of world opinion against it: “The Gaza war” isn’t a fight between Israel and Hamas alone.

Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks and Hezbollah’s subsequent missile fire are directly connected to and funded by a regime nearly a thousand miles away. But its tentacles reach deep into Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank with an ideology that promotes the destruction of Israel and its Western allies.

Lebanese army soldiers gather over the rubble of leveled buildings following Israeli airstrikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sept. 27. Ibrahim Amro/AFP via Getty Images

IT DIDN’T USED TO BE THIS WAY. The Persian King Cyrus, who ruled what is now modern-day Iran, freed his Jewish captives and aided the reestablishment of Israel 2,500 years ago. A remnant of the Jewish population stayed in Iran, and for hundreds of years, Jews and Persians lived in relative peace. After the establishment of the modern-day Jewish nation in 1948, economic and security ties flourished for several decades.

Those ties deteriorated in 1979 when revolutionaries toppled Iran’s secular monarchy and established an Islamic republic, replacing the shah with the Ayatollah Khomeini. The supreme leader severed ties with the West and rolled back decades of progress by implementing strict Islamic dress codes and suppressing human rights.

Ramin Parsa grew up under the ayatollah’s heavy and often brutal hand. One incident still haunts him. While walking to school in the late 1990s, he encountered a crowd in the tens of thousands watching authorities hang several people from a rope attached to a large crane. Parsa was only 11 years old, and the executions gave him nightmares for weeks.

Local authorities claimed the accused were enemies of Islam who spied for Israel and America, the regime’s avowed enemies. Parsa grew up in a devout Muslim family but learned to hate Jews and Christians through the education system.

“Every day, they would read the Quran to us and ask us to shout, ‘Death to America, death to Israel!’ They demonized the Jews,” Parsa said. One lesson promoted false claims that Jews kill Muslim boys and use their blood to make matzo bread.

As he got older, Parsa began questioning Tehran’s religious claims. Years later, he embraced Christianity and immigrated to the United States where he pastored an Iranian church for more than a decade. Now he lives in Israel with his wife, an Israeli citizen.

The Islamic regime’s propaganda of hate and enforcement of strict Islamic laws cast a dark shadow over the lives of ordinary Iranians, and it exported its religious ideology across the region through terrorist networks, assassinations, abductions, and indoctrination.

“Iranians are really suffering, and they sympathize with the Israelis because they see that the regime that has oppressed them for 45 years is the same regime that is oppressing Israel through proxy groups,” Parsa said.

Map source: Counsel on Foreign Relations

HEZBOLLAH is Iran’s prized proxy. Founded in 1982, the terror group’s charter calls for Israel’s destruction, the expulsion of Western influence in the region, and allegiance to Iran’s supreme leader. According to the U.S. State Department, Iran provides hundreds of millions of dollars to Hezbollah each year, making it better armed than Lebanon’s own military.

Hezbollah launched its operations shortly after Israeli forces invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 to expel Palestinian terrorist organizations intent upon destroying the decades-old Jewish nation. At the time, Lebanon was recovering from a bloody civil war that pitted the country’s Sunni, Shiite, and Christian populations against each other.

Local Shiite Muslims formed Hezbollah, or “party of God” in Arabic, to fight Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, and it welcomed Iran as its patron.

Tehran created similar proxy groups in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to form what analysts have dubbed a “ring of fire.” It maintains its grip in these countries by providing a steady flow of arms and military training and promoting its ideology through religious and educational projects. This web of terror creates both a pathway for Iran to achieve regional hegemony as well as a network of scapegoats through which Tehran can attack Israeli and Western interests while claiming it’s not involved.

Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli army colonel and Hamas expert, said Iran presents an existential threat to Israel, one its proxy groups prevent his country from fully addressing: “I think that it’s an Iranian interest to make sure that Israel will be focused on the other fronts.”

According to documents acquired by the Israeli military and reviewed by The New York Times, Iran had advanced knowledge of Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack. And as Israel chased down one Iranian proxy group in Gaza, another one began firing missiles into northern Israel the very next day. During the past year, Hezbollah has launched more than 9,000 rockets from Lebanon into Israel.

A year ago, I visited one of the border towns enduring the near-constant rocket barrage. Pastor Israel Iluz proudly showed me his new church building in Kiryat Shmona, just over the hill from Hezbollah bases in southern Lebanon. Iluz didn’t evacuate like most people in his northern Israeli town of 22,000. Instead, he stayed to cook hundreds of meals each day for soldiers abruptly stationed in makeshift camps with limited supplies.

Iluz’s team of around a dozen people continues to cook for the troops, but they’ve had to retreat to their old building around the corner. A Hezbollah rocket destroyed the new building one Friday in May, not long after the team left the premises.

Iluz said rocket attacks have increased dramatically during the past three months. “There are a lot of rockets everywhere now. It’s not only Kiryat Shmona, although we get the most.”

Hezbollah is responsible for decades of deadly attacks, including the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 Americans, and several attacks against Israelis in places as far away as Argentina and Bulgaria. Both the Gulf States and the Arab League have declared Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

In 1992, it entered Lebanon’s political sphere when eight Hezbollah members won seats in parliament. The party has held cabinet positions since 2005. As its political clout grew, Hezbollah projected a more moderate face, but its overarching mission hasn’t changed.

The group’s pressure tactics in Lebanon (at the behest of Iran) contributed to Lebanon’s current unraveling that includes an economy in shambles, no president, and massive waves of emigration. Hezbollah’s active military arm possesses more than 150,000 missiles, most with long-range capabilities.

That’s one reason Israel is so anxious to fight Hezbollah on its own terms.

In September, Israel’s “exploding pager” operation killed or wounded nearly 3,000 Hezbollah members. Days later, Israeli forces launched a bombing campaign and ground invasion into Lebanon, going town by town to root out Hezbollah operatives and locate weapons stockpiles. They found many hidden in homes.

The offensive has reignited concerns of a wider, full-scale war. Nearly a million people have been displaced already in Lebanon. But Israeli leaders say they cannot return people to their homes until they’ve cleared a buffer zone between the northern border and Lebanon’s Litani River—a condition the United Nations approved in 2006.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews observe an intercepted Iranian ballistic missile that fell in the desert near the city of Arad. Associated Press/Photo by Ohad Zwigenberg

ISRAEL LAST WITHDREW from southern Lebanon in 2000, but that didn’t stop Hezbollah’s attacks. Tensions boiled over in 2006 when the group attacked Israeli border towns and then kidnapped and killed two Israeli soldiers, igniting a monthlong war. The United Nations helped broker a cease-fire and passed Security Council Resolution 1701, requiring Hezbollah to disarm.

But the United Nations failed to enforce its mandate, and Hezbollah began procuring more advanced weaponry from Iran while building a series of tunnels along its southern border.

Since 2013, the terrorist organization has also played a combat role in the Syrian civil war, supporting President Bashar al-Assad while expanding its weapons depots and smuggling networks in the country. Some of those weapons are ending up in Israel.

Milshtein said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps works in tandem with Hezbollah to smuggle weapons into Jordan and across the Israeli border, and it has ramped up efforts in the past four to five months. “They are trying to distribute the weapons all over the West Bank and even among the Arab sector here in Israel,” Milshtein said. “Their goal is to inflame the West Bank.”

Israel governs 60 percent of its West Bank territory, and the rest is governed by the Palestinian Authority, widely considered corrupt and incompetent.

Milshtein said Israelis are now acutely aware of the existential threat Iran poses. He is particularly concerned about its nuclear program. In July, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Tehran was only a week or two away from producing the materials necessary for a nuclear weapon.

For the first time in its history, Iran directly attacked Israel in April and again in October. The latter attack involved nearly 200 ballistic missiles. The Biden administration sent a powerful anti-missile defense system to Israel but publicly declared its opposition to an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites. On Oct. 26, Israel launched retaliatory strikes against military targets. Iran downplayed the damage and said nothing about a possible response, suggesting the violence might not escalate.

Milshtein believes Israel should wind down its offensives in Lebanon and Gaza (where Hamas is still holding dozens of hostages, including four Americans) and focus solely on Iran, in part because it needs the full support of its Arab allies to confront Tehran—an unlikely scenario while thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese are dying in bombardments.

He said Israel has various channels through which to defang Iran, and he has a glimmer of hope for a future regime change. “I think that the alienation between [Generation Z in Iran] and the regime of the mullahs is very, very broad,” Milshtein said. “I really hope that there will be a revolution against this regime because it’s also horrible for the Iranians, not only for the Israelis.”

Hezbollah fighters train with mobile rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. Associated Press/Photo by Hassan Ammar

PARSA DIRECTLY ENCOUNTERED the brutality of Tehran’s regime at age 16 while on his way to a wedding with relatives. The morality police stopped their car at a checkpoint and discovered a small amount of alcohol intended for a wedding toast. The violation earned them a trip to a prison complex.

“They took all our clothes off and began to pour cold water on us. They whipped us with these big, thick cables,” Parsa recalled, adding that he had nothing to do with the purchase of the alcohol and had never consumed any. While imprisoned, he met dozens of teenagers detained for minor offenses related to alcohol and social gatherings.

Eventually, Parsa’s parents paid bribes to secure his release, and he spent much of the next three years poring over Muslim and Christian texts. He first encountered Christianity through radio programming and then used a virtual private network to gain illegal access to the Bible. “My story is not unique because in Iran, millions of people have left Islam,” Parsa said.

His relatives still in Iran tell him the mosques are nearly empty, and few people still honor Islamic traditions. Parsa recalled the religious events in his neighborhood when the streets filled with people wearing black and whipping themselves with chains to commemorate the deaths of Muhammad’s grandsons. Now, the streets are quiet during the annual event.

Parsa claims the majority of Iranians want Israel to cripple the Iranian regime, and they celebrated each successful Israeli retaliation, including the July operation in Beirut that took out Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, the man responsible for the deadly U.S. Marine barracks bombing, and the operations in July and October that killed Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.

Iranians are suffering under an inflation rate topping 35 percent and an unemployment rate reaching nearly 9 percent, although economists say it could be much higher. Tehran’s endless proxy wars are costly, and tolerance for the regime’s oppressive laws has dwindled. Two years ago, the dress-code-­related arrest and subsequent death of an Iranian-Kurdish woman sparked widespread protests that resulted in more than 600 deaths and close to 19,000 arrests.

During a recent video call, Parsa showed me an Iranian news website on his phone and scrolled through the comments—all supportive of Israel’s targeted attacks against Tehran and its proxy groups. He said the site is popular among the Persian diaspora as well as those in Iran, and many had reposted Netanyahu’s message of friendship to Iranians.

“The Israeli government has realized that the Iranian people are on their side, and they are banking on that. I think it’s a very good investment,” Parsa said. “If Israel eliminates the leaders in Iran, I think the people will rise up.”

—This story was corrected Nov. 28 to reflect that Fuad Shukr’s 1983 bombing that killed 241 Americans in Beirut occurred at the U.S. Marine barracks.